Scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present.
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More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.
JML 45.1 (Fall 2021) is now available. Find it on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47191.
Calista McRae
“More human than others”: Stevie Smith and the Minds of Pets
FREE
Caroline Hovanec
“Animal/Fool/Clown”: Stevie Smith’s Frivolity
Aleksandra Hernandez
Jack London’s Poetic Animality and the Problem of Domestication
Tali Banin
The Winged Creatures of The Waves and Virginia Woolf’s Figurations of “The One”
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Karen Ya-Chu Yang
Female Biologists and the Practice of Dialogical Connectivity in Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer
Michael Davidson
“how to dance / sitting down”: Aging, Innovation, and the Graying of Disability
Benjamin Kossak
A Choreography of Parts: The Impersonal Intimacies of Touch and Movement in Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s Poetry, Contact Improvisation, and Embodied Reading
Katie Collins
“Her Ruined Head”: Defacement and Bodyminds in Jean Stafford’s Life and Work
Naomi Miyazawa
The Blindness of the Writer in Nabokov’s Despair
Takashi Sakai
Stonewall Offstage: Recontextualizing Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft Warnings
Robert Volpicelli
Modernist Illness Now
Jess Waggoner
Leaky Masculinities, Porous Nations, Queercrip Affiliations
Rainer Rumold
After the Animal Fable: Creaturely Ciphers in transition
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EDITED BY TIMOTHY YU
Cambridge UP, 2021
ISBN: 9781108741958 Paperback
A new poetic century demands a new set of approaches. This Companion shows that American poetry of the twenty-first century, while having important continuities with the poetry of the previous century, takes place in new modes and contexts that require new critical paradigms. Offering a comprehensive introduction to studying the poetry of the new century, this collection highlights the new, multiple centers of gravity that characterize American poetry today. Essays on African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries respond to the centrality of issues of race and indigeneity in contemporary American discourse. Other essays explore poetry and feminism, poetry and disability, and queer poetics. The environment, capitalism, and war emerge as poetic preoccupations, alongside a range of styles from spoken word to the avant-garde, and an examination of poetry's place in the creative writing era.
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
Timothy Yu is author of Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965, editor of Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets, and author of a poetry collection,100 Chinese Silences. He is the Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry and professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
BY JULIO PREMAT
Translated by Amanda Murphy
Vanderbilt UP, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8265-0225-4 Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-8265-0226-1 Hardcover
https://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/9780826502254/borges/
This book, available for the first time in English, offers a thorough introductory reading of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most remarkable and influential writers of the twentieth century. Julio Premat, a specialist in the field of Borges studies, presents the main questions posed by Borges's often paradoxical writing, and leads the novice through the complexity and breadth of Borges's vast literary production.
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
Originally published in French by an Argentine ex-pat living in Paris, Borges: An Introduction includes the Argentine specificities of Borges’s work—specificities that are often unrecognized or glossed over in Anglophone readings.
This book is a boon for university students of philosophy and literature, teachers and researchers in these fields who are looking to better understand this complex author, and anyone interested in the advanced study of literature. Somewhere between a guidebook and an exhaustive work of advanced research, Borges: An Introduction is the ultimate stepping-stone into the deeper Borgesian world.
Julio Premat is a professor at the Université Paris 8, a member of the Laboratoire d’Etudes Romanes, and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.
Amanda Murphy is a translator and an associate professor of English and translation studies at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris.
BY THADIOUS M. DAVIS
U of South Carolina P, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64336-237-3 hardback │ 978-1-64336-238-0 paper│
978-1-64336-239-7 ebook
https://uscpress.com/Understanding-Alice-Walker
Understanding Alice Walker serves both as an introduction to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner’s large body of work and as a critical analysis of her multifaceted canon. Thadious M. Davis begins with Walker’s biography and her formative experiences in the South and then presents ways of accessing and reading Walker’s complex, interconnected, and sociopolitically invested career in writing fiction, poetry, critical essays, and meditations.
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
Although best known for her novel The Color Purple and her landmark essays In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, Walker began her career with Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. She has remained committed not merely to writing in multiple genres but also to conveying narratives of the hope and transformation possible within the human condition and as visualized through the lens of race and gender.
Davis traces Walker’s literary voice as it emerges from the civil rights and feminist movements to encourage an individual and collective search for justice and joy and then evolves into forceful advocacy for world peace, spiritual liberation, and environmental conservancy. Her writing, a rich amalgamation of the cutting-edge and popular, the new-age and difficult, continues to be paradigm shifting and among the most important produced in the last half of the twentieth century and among the most consistently prophetic in the first part of the twenty-first century.
“In Thadious Davis, Alice Walker has found an ideal reader, one who places the author and her work in personal, historical, and political contexts, one whose critical analysis reveals depth and meaning beyond the obvious, and one whose brilliance complements that of the writer.” — Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University
“This brilliant book provides a dazzlingly crystalline and panoramic portrait of Alice Walker’s expansive body of work. It incorporates insights on Walker’s biography, examining stages in her epic journey as a writer whose life and work have profoundly impacted the world and been devoted to helping its healing.” — Riché Richardson, Cornell University
“a succinct and searching study of Alice Walker’s expansive corpus and evolving imagination. Thadious Davis provides her readers a comprehensive and illuminating overview of Walker’s writings across multiple themes and genres, but also of the contexts—local and global—that have given it form.” — Deborah McDowell, University of Virginia
“Davis reveals an immense scholarly patience with Alice Walker and her works, reading and discussing and analyzing them in a deep and well-organized reconstruction of the author's background against American history and events around the globe.” — Geneva Cobb Moore, author of Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, and Maternal Power in the Novels of Toni Morrison
Thadious M. Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought, Emerita, and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature; Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance; and Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context.
By J. RUSSELL PERKIN
McGill-Queen's UP, 2021
ISBN: 9780228006244
The 1970s in Britain saw a series of industrial disputes, a referendum on membership in the European Economic Community, conflict about issues of immigration and citizenship, and emergent environmental and feminist movements. It was also a decade of innovation in the novel, and novelists often addressed the state of the nation directly in their works.
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
In Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s Russell Perkin looks at social novels by John Fowles and Margaret Drabble, the Cold War thrillers of John le Carré, Richard Adams's best-selling fable Watership Down, the popular campus novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, Doris Lessing's dystopian visions, and V.S. Naipaul's explorations of post-colonial displacement. Many of these highly regarded works sold in large numbers and have enjoyed enduring success - a testament to the power of the political novel to explain a nation to itself. Perkin explores the connections between the novel and politics, situating the works it discusses in the rich context of the history and culture of the decade, from party politics to popular television shows.
Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s elucidates a period of literary history now fifty years in the past and offers a balanced perspective on the age, revealing that these works not only represented the politics of the time but played a meaningful role in them.
"Russell Perkin's emphasis on the ways in which fiction reflects political currents and discussions in the 1970s offers an original and much-needed contribution to our understanding of this tumultuous and neglected period." Caroline Zoe Krzakowski, Northern Michigan University
J. Russell Perkin is professor of English at Saint Mary's University in Nova Scotia, Canada.
